CRY

Abstract

AbstractThe CRY chapter analyzes Maddie Ziegler’s emotive performance as a surrogate face for Sia in her music video “Big Girls Cry.” The video shows Ziegler performing an arty facial choreography that both moves and disturbs: young female spectators and music critics speak of the affective capacity of her performance, and feminist scholarship illuminates how it critiques the expectations placed on girls and women that reduces their emotional expression to that of cry-babies but which needs to be kept in check as adult women. Yet literature on celebrity and whiteness reveals how Sia replaces her own face with that of a beautiful child star to ensure that her economic and racial privilege is maintained. The chapter develops the idea of a manipulative cry to show how the facial choreography produces affective connections between Sia, Ziegler, and their fans, but that it stages an ethically questionable performance of a young girl.